By GIDEON NYENDWA
ZIALE lecturers are to blame for the high failure rate the institution has been experiencing, Zambia Open University (ZAOU) Vice Chancellor Professor Richard Siaciwena has said.The results caused a nationwide uproar when only one student out of 395 managed to clear the ZIALE exams.Prof. Siaciwena said that the pass rate at ZIALE had been going down every year which should be a source of concern for the lecturers at the institution.He said in education, the principle was simple because if the students fail that means the lecturers had failed themselves.“When such a number of people fail, the problem is with the lecturers,” he said.Prof. Siaciwena said there was need for serious investigation of the source of the problem objectively and thoroughly by using different experts because the excuse that ZIALE had been supplied with half-baked students was wrong.“For me I heap all the blame on ZIALE,” Prof Siaciwena said.He said that the reasons why schools conduct continuous assessments was to identify the areas where students were not doing well and improve on them. “The question therefore is, has ZIALE been carrying out continuous assessments because if they did, they would not have been producing such pass rates,” he said.Prof. Siaciwena said having 359 students sit for an examination and producing only one pass should be a source of worry for the institution because producing such a pass rate simply meant that there was something wrong with the instructions or the curriculum.He said that if they had been teaching the students and they produced such kind of results that meant that they did not prepare the students well and the instructions were not effective.“You teach people to pass not to fail,” he said.Prof. Siaciwena said the quality of output was determined by a number of factors which include the interaction the students have had with the lecturers; whether it was sufficient or not, enough facilities, learning resources and whether the lecturers were qualified or not.He also said that there was a serious need to check the examination itself that the students were being subjected to, they needed to test the validity and reliability of those examinations.Prof Luke Mumba from the University of Zambia and Prof Naison Ngoma, former Copperbelt University Vice Chancellor have also rubbished the assertions that universities were supplying half-baked students to ZIALE and called for the introspection of the institution to determine the reason for their failure.
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